


ghosts don't have homes, do they?

by hongmunmu



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Bittersweet, Gen, Kirigakure, Memories, Nostalgia, One Shot, Suigetsu-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 14:53:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13813500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hongmunmu/pseuds/hongmunmu
Summary: Sixteen years after his abduction, after the war, after most everyone else has had their happy ending, Suigetsu finally goes home.





	ghosts don't have homes, do they?

When Suigetsu returns to Kirigakure for the first time, it’s a ghost town, and every face he knows is long gone.

There is a pain in outliving your family; nay, outliving everyone who might ever have remembered you. For every year he was gone, a piece of Suigetsu was broken away from Kiri, from the village’s collective consciousness. Obliterated. Sixteen years later Suigetsu stands by the house he grew up in, and watches hosts of strangers swan by where once there had been nothing but familiar faces. He himself has hardly changed, yet he is an alien in this town; a tourist in his own home.

When Orochimaru did things he did them well. Every document, every photo, every scrap of paper that indicated Suigetsu Hozuki had ever existed was eradicated from Kirigakure’s records. There were no immediate relatives to notice, and those who were not relative by blood had taken their knowledge of him to the grave. By the time he is twenty-six, the Suigetsu Hozuki who was born to a lone mother and practiced kenjutsu each day with his superiors on the training field had disappeared entirely. Erased from the world and living on in only one mind; his own.

For most of his life, willingly or not, Suigetsu had lived to be seen by others; Mangetsu, the Seven Swordsmen, Orochimaru, Taka. Faced with solitude, he’s unsure of how to act, of what it meant to do something entirely for himself— something small, and private, and to be known only to him. So perhaps it doesn’t come as a surprise that Suigetsu doesn’t realise he is at last, sixteen years late, saying his goodbye.

He stalks the town like a pilgrim, paying homage to the places that had once been the model for how he envisioned his heart. The places he had visited in his dreams now in the flesh, none of them how he remembers, and yet familiar as ever. Phantom limbs. Phantom homes.

With his head down Suigetsu pensively walks the same creek where he and Mangetsu had once come running, sticks raised in their hands like swords, and hunted for snakes. The water which had once seemed like an ocean to him now barely met his knees. He finds the stone training ground where he had first seen Kubikiribocho, where his superiors Kisame and Zabuza had crossed blades with their sharp teeth bared in huge grins, and runs his fingers across every worn scratch and dent in the floor and dummies and scattered rocks where he had spent hours practicing swing, after swing, after swing.

He goes to the shoreline, to the cold beach of scattered pebbles and sediment where Mangetsu and his father had wasted years trying to teach him the Hozuki hiden. Suigetsu had trod those freezing shallows for hours at a time while his brother demonstrated hydrification time and again, and his father barked instructions and harsh guidance, keeping him out at bay deep enough that he would have to tread water to breathe, _because if you don’t take it seriously you’ll never learn._ Suigetsu wades into those same shallows now; kicks off his sandals and leaves them on the shore, weighed down with pebbles lest the wind take them. He’s long since stopped flinching at the feeling of stones under his bare feet. The technique comes to him easier than breathing now, and the moment he is submerged he liquefies, one with the sea entirely.

If anything in this world remembered the person he had once been, Suigetsu thinks, it would be the sea.

For longer than he thinks to keep track of, he stays like that; dissolved in this primordial soup, every particle of him water undistinguishable from that which sprung from cracks in the earth. He doesn’t necessarily see while in this form, not as he does when human, but he maintains an awareness of sorts. He’s never thought to analyse it. The nitty gritty of his chakra and abilities were something Orochimaru had researched in detail, but never much bothered to share, and frankly, Suigetsu couldn’t care less anyway. It worked. He was. He left it that.

He wants to stay like that, forever. His whole consciousness in nothing more than a droplet of water; caught in that marvellous cycle of falling to the earth, and sinking into a river, and being carried to the sea and rising into clouds and falling back to the earth again (there’s a name for that which they’d taught him at school, but Suigetsu had never paid attention). All that and waterfalls, and snow, and wearing down cliffs and drowning people. It would be good. Badass, really. To be a droplet of water.

Suigetsu is the sea, the thoughtless daydreaming crashing sea until his chakra runs out, and he feels himself start to pull into solid form again. By the time his head resurfaces the sky’s gone dark and low, pregnant with monsoon, and the tide’s up far enough that his sandals are gone anyway. No need for the millstones. He walks the cold grey streets barefoot, past teenagers spray-painting any sheltered spots they can find, past women securing their windows for the night; past shady groups of nin that stop their hushed conversations and watch him go by in silence before continuing their business. He stops to get two grilled unagi skewers at a stand which had once been familiar to him but is now run by someone he doesn’t recognise, and eats one crouched in an underpass, wrapped in a plastic sheet. He leaves the other next to a beggar lying in a dirty old sleeping bag nearby, who wordlessly takes it and eats it in two bites. They sit side by side in complete, almost knowing silence, and wait for the storm to pass.

When Suigetsu pulls the old-fashioned stone knocker, two months after he swore he was gone for good, Orochimaru says nothing. He opens the door and shows him in.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> there's a very specific kind of feeling that goes with returning to a place once familiar and beloved, and finding it has changed, or forgotten you, or you can no longer enter. i feel it every time i see the house i grew up in, among other places.  
> i'm still not really 100% on why suigetsu/the rest of taka are still with orochimaru after all he did to them, and yeah it's probably just more bad writing, but i'm gonna chalk it up to them simply not having anywhere else better to go. suigetsu isn't a prisoner any more, but i feel it's because orochimaru offered him the freedom to go home, Knowing he would come back. suigetsu isn't motivated enough to chase things down on his own, i feel. he's depressed, karin


End file.
